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I'd rather them wait to make 4.0 stable than release crap and hope to have it done by 4.1. I mean, c'mon, who do they think they are? KDE? But seriously, I was using the FF4 beta for a while and it was pretty slick, and faster than the last stable release. However, it had lots of issues, such as the flash plugin container freezing or crashing constantly. The new features in FF4 did warm me up to trying Chrome though, and I may have become converted despite being late to the party on that one.

People seem to assume that Firefox has become insanely slow over the years but forget that they are actively using a number of plugins for Firefox which slows things down - such as Ad Block. They then go and test alternate browsers, forgetting that their alternative isn't doing the same thing or sometimes, isn't even possible to do the same thing and yet get the feeling that things are way faster than before. Unfortunately, many people don't realize they are actually doing a seat of the pants, apples to ora

Except, empirically, we know that not to be the case. Software such as Ad Block works by potentially performing a large number of comparisons, including but not limited to, expensive regular expressions. These comparisons are neither free in memory or CPU and specifically for the CPU, must be paid, to some degree, large or small, with every page load.

I think that page fetches from ad-serving websites are orders of magnitude slower than 'expensive' regular expression comparisons, so I wouldn't be surprised running ad block software will save clock-time on any web-page that has ads served from a different page/server.

I don't care what benchmarks say...the butt-dyno (eye-dyno?) tells me that it works much faster than Firefox. Whether it's true or not doesn't matter to me...it feels faster, and that's what I care about.

I definitely agree that Chrome seems faster than Firefox 3.6, as much as I disbelieved it before. So I -tried- to switch to Chrome, and I -tried- to like it, but it's just missing too much for my liking.

I'm not a fan of the minimalistic UI, but I could get used to that. But the URL/search bar is vastly inferior to Firefox's, and it was putting regularly visited sites under sites I'd visited once and random google searches. I thought maybe it would just take a while to pick up on things but after a week or 2

Beta 9 is more stable than previous releases, and about even with Firefox 3 in my opinion. And that's what counts -- whatever they may say about the NUMBER of outstanding bugs, it's only the bugs that hit a typical user on a typical day that matter for the perceived stability of a program. With a few more weeks of spit and polish, Firefox 4 should be even with the competition in terms of daily stability. The fact the Mozilla advertises its bug list more than, say, IE9 should not make people think its known bug list is longer than IE9's.

I agree. I think one of the fallacies is that people are comparing FF4 (major, new release with tons of features (and tons of "features") that will have problems) with FF3.6 (mature and stable, but slow and not very fully-featured). Features that are just appearing in FF4 and are miles ahead of other browsers might be dismissed now, but will be powerful incentives down the road. The fact that FF4 is introducing a large number of new features without a major performance slowdown (supposedly) should be recogn

Beta 9 is more stable than previous releases, and about even with Firefox 3 in my opinion.

My experiences differ from yours. Perhaps I'm just cursed, though. I installed 4 beta 9, and while it was stable in the "does not crash every 3 seconds way" it was pretty nasty feeling. The full interface lagged to hell, this persisted even when I downloaded the latest daily Minefield. After going through some bouts of extension hell (no CSlite?, grrr...), things got a little better, tabs would actually load in und

My experiences are even worse than yours. FF4b9 crashes on me right at startup. I assume that one of the (few) extensions is causing this, but I'm too lazy to go into safe mode and debug it. It is a beta, after all, and so I'll just wait for the next beta (I did let FF send off, oh, maybe 20 crash reports).

In the meantime, I'll stick with pale moon [palemoon.org], which is a version of FF3.6.X highly optimized for modern processors and Windows. It runs significantly faster than regular FF, since it doesn't have to s

Agreed, Firefox has been on a horrible decline since version 2.0, the last thing they need to do is continue that trend.

Nowadays I find it slower than it's competitors, and I find it less stable, every once in a while it just crashes. It also seems to have horrendous memory leak issues, if I leave it running overnight it's not unusual to find it chewing up 2gb of RAM in the morning and I've even seen it edge pretty close to 4gb on one occasion. Even IE never does any of these things for me nowadays.

Just to give my totally random opinion on FF4, I'm mostly ok with it apart from 2 things.

1) The lack of a status bar. You either love it or hate it, I hate it. I have a high resolution and I want functionality more than about 10px extra real estate.2) The default theme. WTF? It's ugly black-and-white, the FF3 theme is a million times nicer and more colourful. The first thing I'll have to do with any FF4 install is go grab a decent theme.

I went the opposite way, I liked the chrome interface but jumped back to ff4 now that it has a similar space saving design. Chrome's internal architecture does not seem to allow script blocking per source domain like firefox's noscript.

I've been running the Seamonkey nightlies since they announced 2.1 Alpha and I've barely had any issues at all outside of a couple of plugins that took a while to update their version support. There was a minor issue for a couple of weeks where the browser would hang on startup for ~10 seconds, as well as a weird one with the Dell DRAC5 web interface not working properly and obviously Flash is as shit as on any platform, but otherwise it's been a smooth ride.

When I tried the new beta, the first thing that happened was that it popped up a "welcome" page touting how fast the new beta was.

Then it froze long enough to get Windows to mark it (Not Responding) in the title bar. (I reenabled the menu while using an earlier beta so I guess I'm missing out on "tabs in title bar." Somehow, I don't care.)

To their credit, it doesn't always do this, but it does it enough to be annoying. I don't care how fast Firefox can run JavaScript - really all I care about is that running JavaScript doesn't make the browser completely non-responsive.

There's a reason those benchmarks are in there, it's because google wrote those benchmarks and only google bothered optimizing for them. If you actually run your browser through the benchmark you'll find it probably competes fairly well except on the crazy why in the hell would I do this with javascript test, which is where it falls down and google wins.

Maybe I'm just remarkably tolerant of buggy software, but I've been using Firefox 4 as my only browser since beta 1 and I haven't had any complaints once I set the UI up the way I like it. It crashes once or twice a week but who cares? When I start it back up all my tabs are still open and I've lost is a few seconds of time.

there are still more than 100 "hardblocker" bugs, more than 60 bugs affecting Panorama alone and 10 bugs affecting the just-introduced Tabs-on-Titlebar

So, in other words, Firefox 4 will be buggy because it wont ship until those bugs are fixed. Makes sense-- wait, what?

Some long-standing bugs wont' be fixed in time for Firefox 4 final either

So its a super buggy version of firefox, and shouldnt be shipped because there are bugs that had been present for a long time, and are still present (flash stealing keyboard focus, etc).

Many startup bugs are currently pending, although Firefox 4 starts much faster than Firefox 3.6

So they made major inroads, but theyre not "good enough" yet.

unlikely that Firefox 4 final will pass the Acid3 test,

....Which, AFAIK isnt really that important as firefox 4 scores a respectable 97 out of 100 (firefox 4 beta 9), and its an artificial test anyways testing how well a browsers CSS breaks. However, I will note the bug's assignee: "Nobody; OK to take it and work on it"-- so if someone feels its worth the extra bragging rights they can fix those last 3 issues in a pointless test?

Perhaps we'll have to wait until Firefox 4.1 to have this "huge pile of bugs" (mostly) fixed."

This is perhaps the dumbest article criticizing a new firefox release ever. Firefox 3, yes, I can understand awesome bar pissed some people off. But firefox 4 brings tons of improvements, and even from reading the summary you get the impression that it has fewER bugs than prior versions; and yet the submitter seems unsatisfied that bugs yet remain. Perhaps you can point us to a major, complex project such as an HTML interpreter that ISNT a "huge pile of bugs"? Couldnt I label Linux a "huge pile of bugs"? Perhaps Linus should stop shipping kernels until all problems are solved, or perhaps revert to using 2.6.37.0.0.1 to denote the fact that there are still many bugs in there. Perhaps we should put the pressure on for him to get on it and release a new kernel absent all these bugs.

Its like submitter feels entitled to a pristine bug free experience. Firefox 4 doubtless took a phenomenal number of man hours to make as much progress as it did; perhaps some gratitude for what a phenomenally high quality piece of volunteer effort it is, rather than whining about bugs that remain open, would be in order.

The best part about the Acid3 complaints are that Firefox' missing 3 points are for SVG Fonts, which are becoming optional for support in SVG 2.0 anyway. And yet people are fixated on those 3 points as if they are some giant indictment of Firefox' slipping standards support.
My question is whether Hixie will eventually change Acid3 to reflect the change in status since it doesn't seem right to have a standards compliance test that faults browser vendors for not supporting optional parts of a specification. Doesn't exactly seem fair to me. Maybe Acid3.1?

Yes, this often works. I've been on bugs with like a hundred cc:'s that've been open for years with 129 comments and lots of rationalization that have been closed 'DUPLICATE' of a bug opened a few months ago, got the attention of some other developer who thought he owned it, and it got fixed inside two weeks.

I guess in the true OSS way I'll have to fork the project and add my own.;)

(yes yes, sarcasm. probably best to spell it out ahead of time, because what slashdot post isn't complete these days without a plethora of disclaimers and qualifiers)

The necessary qualifier to ensure my criticism of open source software doesn't earn me a minus 1: I like open source.The necessary disclaimer that forking FF is silly: I am well aware that third party extensions for FF4 exist that add status bar function.

No, torn between the people that demand that all Firefox features be reduced to addons and the people who want everything in their browser, they gave in to the addon people and made it an addon [mozilla.org] if you need the old status bar back.

At this point, Mozilla can't win no matter what they do. If they take features away and put them in addons, the people who want everything (like me:) ) complain. If they add features in, the people who want all the features they in particular don't need to be addons complain. They're in a no-win situation. They put an incredible focus on performance, and people ignore it. Firefox 4 doesn't just have a new, much faster Javascript engine - there's DOM performance improvements, the startup improvements mentioned in the summary, and the UI in general is much smoother and quicker. But it doesn't matter, because my $PET_PROBLEM_X exists. I don't understand why other browsers aren't held to the same standard. Chrome, for me, is missing tons of features and crashes all the time. It's still a decent browser, and I don't spend all day on Slashdot railing against it.

That said, there is a really annoying bug in Beta 9 - some of my tabs, after I close them, still exist in the ether somewhere and the Awesomebar wants to "switch to tab" when I go to that URL, and there's no tab to switch to, making me press alt+enter to open a new tab.

But I'm pretty confident that and the other major blockers will be fixed by the final release, whenever it comes out. Firefox 4 is still a major improvement over 3.6 even with those bugs, and despite my personal pet peeves like tabs-in-titlebar.

That said, there is a really annoying bug in Beta 9 - some of my tabs, after I close them, still exist in the ether somewhere and the Awesomebar wants to "switch to tab" when I go to that URL, and there's no tab to switch to, making me press alt+enter to open a new tab.

In my experience then, the performance enhancements just aren't being felt. In real world use, I can't say that Firefox or Safari is "faster" - they both perform adequately in terms of speed.

I'm not sitting at my desk thinking "I wish this browser would just be faster!" at this stage of the game - all the browsers I have tried have been pretty good in recent years. What does affect me are large swings in usability that make a browser annoying to use - like the removal of the status bar, or whatever bug has been added to Webkit that causes the hyper annoying "no paste" in some slashdot comment boxes on Safari.

Performance matters to an extent, but I think it's been turned into a "my browser is 30 ms faster!" pissing contest now that the "my browser scores higher on Acid!" stuff has died down a little.

I agree that they're (FF devs) stuck between the proverbial Dwane Johnson and a hard place; a big complaint was feature bloat, so they stripped features, but that argument falls down a little when something like Pandora is rolled in as a primary feature and something as simple and useful as the status bar is taken out. Not all people like Pandora, so they can disable it. Not all people *don't* like a status bar... but you have to go third party extension to get it back.

I wonder if the ultimate goal of the FF project should be a "roll your own" - a core, barebones browser that has a whole list of features available, and you just checkbox the ones you want at download (or install) time, or go for a few pre-defined profiles.

As you may notice, from your own link, you need a third party extension to bring the status bar back, as I mentioned in my post originally; necessary because YES they did take away the option to have the status bar.

Using third party extensions to put back functionality that you removed is the very definition of "took away the option". If the option still existed, as it does in FF 3.6, then this third party extension would not be necessary.

You can try and justify the decision with a handwavy "oh, you can get a plugin" but that really isn't the point.

Ok, so in the spirit of "removing bloat" Pandora is now a feature, but to balance it out, the status bar has to go!

There are some UI elements that genuinely work and are useful without being bloated or ineffective - the status bar was (is) one of them; somewhere to display the entire URL when you hover on a link and any other "status" items the browser shows you.

Your argument that the entire point is that it has extensions to get it the way you want would work if the thing was totally barebones and you had to add in everything you wanted - like Pandora, ad blocking, flash plugin etc, but that's just not the case. What you have now is a browser that has some default features that are more suited to plugins, and some plugins that really should be built in.

So, if I shouldn't have to download extensions, how do I turn on the status bar?

Assuming, that by your own admission, it "should have enough features that most users shouldn't need to". I am *far* from the only person who has expressed dismay at the removal of such a core function, so if the people who are ambivalent about the bar (ie, can just disable if if they don't want it if it was included) is more than 50% of the total users, compared to the ones that want it to stay then it's ok because "most" don't

I love open source and firefox, I feel sad when I hear there are problems, but writing tight code is indeed challenging for anyone. The plugin compatibility in particular seem to present a challenge. Still using it and recommending it though. Chrome may be open source too, but big-corporation-sponsored open source frequently becomes something else later on in life. I think open source needs to start pushing a pledges [wikipedia.org] model of funding, the totally-free or ad-sponsored models don't fit for all cases.

I think open source needs to start pushing a pledges model of funding, the totally-free or ad-sponsored models don't fit for all cases.

Of all the open source projects that can claim lack of money is the source of their woes, Firefox must be one of the least worthy after perhaps the kernel and a few dual licensed projects. Through the Google deal they have been in a far better position than almost every other open source project that has had minimal impact on Google development, if they trip this up they have no one else to blame.

When these values are sufficiently close, it's time to recognize that something is very deeply wrong with your code base. Or your programmers are monkeys, but the former case is most likely.
Start over.

This type of thing is inevitable when you have a huge codebase, in any project. But starting over is a path to disaster - there might be 10,000 outstanding bugs in the current Firefox codebase, but there are undoubtedly hundreds of thousands of fixed bugs in it too, and a restart tosses more good than bad.

Think of Netscape, they were the king of the browser market. They did a clean restart, and it took them so long to create anything useful that Netscape never recovered.

During development of a product, you will see new bug rates go much higher than fixed bug rates. This imbalance will continue until you stop adding new features and focus purely on stabilization and product delivery. Firefox 4.0 beta 9 is still landing features (some of which have been baking for a long time in separate branches) so their bug rates look pretty sane to me. All products ship with known bugs - you just try to trim the list down to things that users are highly unlikely to see.

For web browsers, crash bugs are the most dangerous. They may represent routes through the code where bad pointers are being consumed and these can potentially lead to remote exploits. All reproducible crash bugs should be fixed as soon as possible.

Having browsed through the outstanding bug list for Firefox 4.0 and looked at the planned schedule (late February release), it looks reasonable. If some of the new features lead to a burst of new defects, I suspect that date will move out or features will get blacklists (like the WebGL/ Hardware acceleration blacklists for Linux)

I've been using Chrome for the last two weeks and it's been great. Adblock Plus and Mouse Gestures were really the only two extensions I needed, and they're in there. Oh, and Firebug, but the built-in Inspector thing almost outdoes it. (Ctrl-Shift-I)

I don't like that they refuse to implement clickSelectsAll as an option for the address bar (instead relying on the user pressing Ctrl-L), but it's not enough to cause me to switch back.

I switched to Chrome recently as well. I don't see myself going back to Firefox for a long time. I understand that they're well respected around here for being one of the early open source works to make serious in-roads on the desktop but it really is time to let it go.

The rendering issues on OS X were known bugs and were in the release notes for 4.0b9. You are using beta software and there are bound to be bugs. It is fixed in their repo, and you can run Minefield (nightly builds) if you want to get the fix.

The rendering issues on OS X were known bugs and were in the release notes for 4.0b9. You are using beta software and there are bound to be bugs. It is fixed in their repo, and you can run Minefield (nightly builds) if you want to get the fix.

I know I'm running beta - thats actually why I'm running it.

However not seen the release notes as I was not given a choice - it was upgraded automatically from 4.0b8...

The "killer feature" of Firefox, at least for me, is Live Bookmarks. I subscribe to nearly a hundred webcomics, and Live Bookmarks is my favorite way to read them. I've tried other systems, but they just don't feel right.

However, ever since Firefox 3.x, there's been a massive bug. Firefox will literally stop responding while it updates Live Bookmarks. Normally, if you have just a handful, it's barely noticeable. But when you have as many as I do, it means Firefox takes about 5 minutes to start up, about t

I used to use Live Bookmarks once. However I find the nearly useless since I have to open each feed individually and remember what was in there before to see if there are updates. Now I use Google Reader, which is not only cross-browser, but shows all my feeds in one spot, and only shows me unread new items.

You act as if it's the first beta. This is the 9th beta release for a project that was supposed to be released in November. For reference, Alpha 1 was released in Feb 2010, almost an entire year ago. So yes, bugs in beta are expected, but eventually you start looking like an 8 year old who can't graduate first grade.

Generally, Beta is when a product is mostly feature complete, and bugs are being fixed prior to release. Now, if you accept this, then the Firefox 4 beta cycle has been more like a late Alpha release since new features were being added from beta version to beta version. From this, is it any wonder there are still bugs in beta 9? The speed improvements in beta 9 clearly are not the result of fixing bugs or removing test code, so I wouldn't be too worried about the bugs we are seeing right now.

No, it is an old tradition. The number four is considered unlucky [wikipedia.org] because in some languages it sounds like the word for death. I am surprised that this version number doesn't get skipped more often. Actually, in computers it would be better to skip version 1.0 since that is often the most buggy release. If you are going to write some new software, go straight to version 2.0 (or version 3.0 for Microsoft).

And yet if were the IE team to say the same thing Microsoft would be being constantly trashed claiming that they're ignoring standards. Oh how double standards are fun.

Except SVG Fonts are going to be an optional part of the SVG standard, because the standards committee recognizes they are unimportant. This is because superior alternatives exist (WOFF). This is why Mozilla chose not to implement SVG Fonts. Despite all the FUD in the summary (what is with the anti-Firefox FUD in stories lately, anyway?), the vast majority of Firefox users are not crying out for Firefox to pass a meaningless, arbitrary, and outdated acid test. SVG Fonts are what keeps Firefox from passing the test. There is no benefit to adding that feature except to pass the Acid3 test.

Considering that Internet Explorer has been lagging in support for basic features behind Firefox, Safari, and Opera for many years, I don't think there's a double standard. If Microsoft finally catches up with IE9, there's going to be rejoicing, not complaining.

And yes, people skip parts of standards all the time if they don't think they're important, especially when the standard was created for a totally different use case (in particular, SVG as originally written was basically created to not be used with HTML and not be used on the web; there were nods to both but they were not the primary use case). How many zip decompressors actually allow multiple copies of the same file to be present in the archive and look at the index to see which one to extract? How many just grab whatever they find?

I think the issue in this case is that some of the standards involved have bits that are actively harmful to the web, from the point of view of some of the implementors involved. so it's not that they're useless; useless parts of a standard can be implemented. It's that they actively do damage...

I find that to be disappointing and unexpected. Keep in mind that I do not know what it takes to create a browser or what is involved in passing the Acid3 test. I just know that Firefox has a strong and loyal user base who are not interested in using another browser. I am one of them.

Is SVG fonts the only thing that keeps FF4 at less-than 100%? If so, I am less concerned -- SVG fonts is a good idea, but I would be more interested in other things as I have not seen SVG fonts in use anywhere. (I know, it's a chicken or egg thing.) That said, I love SVG. It's an awesome technology. Not long ago, I was planning a project that will enable me to generate SVG output based on the contents of a database... in this case, a floor layout for my office and the location of all resources and people where output can be filtered or limited based on report criteria. (The project is on the back burner for now, but the fact that SVG is an XML document format makes generating this sort of output amazingly possible.)

SVG fonts are the only thing keeping Firefox 4 from getting a 100% score on Acid3. I'm not sure if Firefox 4 passes the performance aspect, although it's probably close. I think also Firefox 4 shows a favicon in the URL bar even when it's returned with a 404 error, and if so, it doesn't fully pass the rendering aspect. In any case, it's so close to passing Acid3 that web developers and users would hardly notice the difference, aside from web developers not being able to use SVG fonts. But since WOFF fonts s

This very one [mozilla.org] is 12 years old (yes, you read right), it's huting HTML4 compliance (HTML5 is not a standard yet) and is also affecting all known opensource browsers.
Eyecandies first, stuff that matters maybe.

As a side note, it's unlikely that Firefox 4 final will pass the Acid3 test, despite this being a very popular demand amongst silly people who don't understand web development.

The Acid tests are demos, not unit tests of HTML compliance. I would rather see real progress in areas where FF is truly weak (like, say, the crappy SVG renderer) than worry about those last three pips on Acid3.

I've reported dozens of Firefox bugs over the years. Although I'm primarily a chip designer, I have studied usability (HCI, etc.), and I have a background in testing as well. I know about making intuitive systems, and I've been trained to be more objective about it, rather than just complaining about what I don't like. When I report Firefox bugs, they may get ignored because they're understaffed, but I've never had one tell me flat out that I was wrong. I HAVE had Chrome devs just tell me I'm wrong. Does working for Google automatically make you arrogant?

Having about 30 Google or ex-Google employees in my friends or friends of friends circle and having talked with probably 40 or more at various parties and other events over the years I can say that it's about a 75-85% arrogance rate. Some worse than others. I believe the culture helps promote it. Generally the ones who aren't raging assholes are the ones who arrived there after spending some time in other parts of the industry or advanced academia (PhD work or professorial). The kids who went there right out of undergrad are the worst since Google does a great job of sheltering them from the real world. At this point if I meet anyone who's under 27 or so and has worked at Google for a while I assume any conversation will be unproductive unless I agree 100% with what they're saying. I'll be pleasantly surprised if this isn't the case.

On the plus side, the people I know who've escaped the clutches of Google often display a very serious drop in arrogance levels within a year or so.

They used to ban Slashdot referrals because of the heavy traffic. Guess a Slashdoting ain't what it used to be.

That's insane, that too-much-popularity would become undesirable. We desperately need some different new kind of HTTP server that's decentralized, combined with P2P. Maybe IPV6 will allow adding a plugin serving from browser cache while you're on the site or something. I've looked for projects like these and found several, but none ever caught on.

The problem is bugzilla is written in Perl as a CGI, it's horribly inefficient. Just the 5 second availability check from my F5 cluster had a single core VM running on an x5670 Xeon pegged at ~80% CPU usage. We had to change the check to pulling one of the static help files in order to quiet down the obscene CPU usage which means we are only checking the Apache module not the entire stack.

It's been a while, but I seem to recall you can run Bugzilla under ModPerl, which keeps the compiled versions in memory and simply re-executes them - yes, kinda like it should be - and thus gives you rather impressive speedups.

ModPerl has some gotchas re. variable scope and cleanup, though, so I may be wrong about it Just Working.

The biggest thing (other than UI) is Gecko vs Webkit. Pretty much all of the main functionality is duplicated across both - ad blocking, popup blocking, other extensions etc, but there tend to be a lot more FF plugins, so if you're very plugin-happy, you may be unhappy with Chrome. I'm using Chrome as my sandboxing browser (keeps Facebook isolated from everything else I browse on the web), and it's pretty good. I used to use FF 3.6 for that, but I'm giving Chrome a go.

I haven't found ABP on chrome to be as good. I did switch to chrome for a while but have recently decided more privacy is good, so now I use FF with ABP, "Cookie Monster" and "Better Privacy"

It makes using the web a little more difficult at first (having to remember cookies when I actually want them) but after a few days of setup it's mostly the same, only without so many damned cookies. I also like to use ABP to block anything and everything from facebook.com and fbcdn unless I'm actually at facebook.com,

Chrome is better in just about every way with the exception of extensions. There are basically two killer features that work better under Firefox than Chrome: script blocking (NoScript) and ad blocking (AdBlock Plus). There are ad blocking extensions for Chrome, but they don't work quite as well as AdBlock Plus does.

There is no real equivalent to NoScript for Chrome. There are a bunch of things that kinda provide script blocking functionality, but nothing that's anywhere near as good as NoScript.

Beyond that it's much faster and more memory efficient. It doesn't like being left open long periods of time, though. I can get away with leaving Firefox open for like a week or so, Chrome pretty much demands that you kill it and restart it every day. Not really a huge deal.

The only thing I really miss in Chrome is NoScript. The ad blocking is mostly good enough.

I've always found that Chrome uses more memory than Firefox. The last I checked, it liked to swap memory out to disk, so RAM usage is low, but then when I click on a tab I haven't used for a while, I have to wait while the process is swapped back in to RAM. I haven't found that I need to restart Chrome on a regular basis though.

The main reasons I don't use Chrome are lack of Print Preview, and the fact that any file that opens in a helper application is permanently downloaded into my downloads folder. When

Firefox is the lazy and slow loser next door that's nevertheless lovable. Chrome is rich, refined and snappy but slightly creepy. It doesn't make you wanna leave it alone with your kids.

Firefox is slower (in my case it currently hangs for roughly a minute on start-up. Keep those windows open), has better extensions and the best memory management I've ever seen in a browser (used to be a pet peeve of mine, when they still sold memory leaks as features). Chrome has some great features if you connect to the cloud to socialize your AJAX relationships or something (e.g. you can treat browser pages like apps with start menu entries and stuff - although I always have to reload many manually after launch for it to work properly). It's fast and it will always be up-to-date. That's because Google puts its update service (pray to god that that's all it does) everywhere you can fit that stuff on Windows. There's the Autostart entry, the delayed start, the service, the IE plugin, the Firefox plugin, the Opera plugin and probably a few I missed. But don't be afraid that it's gonna spy on you. Many of the bleeding edge features (Google's new app-store) only work if you log-in with your Google account so they're gonna know every thing about you anyway.

That's what I mean with slightly creepy. Your neighbor might have never given you any reason to question his integrity but if he insists on going through your trash and wants to install a camera in your bathroom you're probably gonna be suspicious.

Firefox's library of well-functioning and stable extensions (and...cough...other extensions) is larger. If you need those plug-ins, it's a no-brainer. If you plan to use the browser "stock" it really comes down to personal preference on the interface and what happens to be more stable on your system. Firefox 3 has gotten rather slow and long in the tooth, so my personal browser preference (this week) runs something like Firefox 4 beta > Opera > Chrome > Safari > Firefox 3 > wget > Internet

The nice thing about Firefox is the ability to whitelist cookies and then have it clear anything not whitelisted on browser close. Chrome's cookie controls are still not even close to that and it's the one feature that keeps me off Chrome.

Can anyone give a quick explanation of the relative pros/cons of Firefox4 vs. Chrome?

Although I find Chrome's interface a little uncomfortable (as a long-time Firefox user), I don't really know if there's a big reason to prefer one over the other. So a big delay of FF4 seems kind of irrelevant to me: I'd just use FF3 or Chrome.

Let's have a real one:

Chrome uses one process per tab - it uses a lot of memoryFirefox uses one process per plug, the rest is threaded - it uses way less memory (by a large difference if you start opening tabs)

Chrome starts very quicklyFirefox starts slower

Chrome updates silently in the background, its rather bad if you like to be in control of your PC (if Google decides evil or someone hack their update service, you get your trojan served silently)Firefox downloads in the background but prompt for update -